Jane Howard, author of The Cazalet Chronicle, dies aged 90

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Jane Howard, author of The Cazalet Chronicle, dies aged 90

Jan 03 2014

For much of a career spanning more than 60 years, the writer Elizabeth Jane Howard, who has died aged 90, suffered a certain condescension from literary editors as a writer of "women's novels". But it did not deter her. She herself described her readers as "women and educated men", and expressed "puzzlement" when Margaret Drabble left her out of her 1985 edition of The Oxford Companion to English Literature.

Jane (as she was always called) achieved a triumph in her 70s with The Cazalet Chronicle, a highly praised tetralogy of novels set in the England of 1937-47. Jane bore both triumph and disappointment with the dignity that had already seen her through decades of literary acclaim and disdain.

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